Short Biography of a Long and Exciting Life - Roger PfeufferRoger was born in Saginaw Michigan. He attended the same high school as his parents and actually had some of the same teachers.
He grew up reading, collecting rocks and minerals and spent inordinate amounts of time “looking for arrowheads” along the many prehistoric sites in the Saginaw River basin.
Roger graduated high school in 1960 and began as a freshman at the University of Michigan that Fall. He started in anthropology, then switched to geology, then to forestry as a major.
Undecided and underachieving, he left school for a year which he spent in California working in the spacecraft industry.
In 1963 he returned to the U of M and majored in education with majors in Science, Math and English.
His first job was in Ann Arbor as a 6th grade teacher. That was followed by a year in Fort Defiance, Arizona teaching 6th grade to traditional Navajos.
Frustrated with an administration locked in the 1950’s or before, he left to get his masters in Educational Administration and Leadership at State University of New York at Brockport.
He returned to Arizona, this time Tucson and the University of Arizona, to begin a doctoral program in Anthropology and Education, a program that ended for him in ABD (all but dissertation). He had begun work as an elementary teacher in TUSD.
After classroom teaching 8 years, in Tucson and Singapore (2 year leave of absence), he was assigned to a number of increasingly responsible administrative positions: ombudsman; elementary principal; middle school assistant principal; middle school principal; assistant superintendent (Vail, AZ); superintendent (Vail, AZ); assistant superintendent (Tucson Unified) and superintendent (Tucson Unified).
Roger retired, finally, in 2008. In 2009 he became involved with a group trying to preserve the cultural assets on the west side of the Santa Cruz River. This involved the preservation and re-creation of those assets in what is called Tucson Origins Heritage Park.
He has had that as his passion to this day and continues on the Board of the non- profit organization Friends of Tucson’s Birthplace.
